Quite Easily Demonstrated
by Grav
Summary: In which John is a trifle insecure, Elizabeth finds it fascinating, and then they dun sex.


**AN: **This was my very first ficathon, written for swficathon at livejournal for rosewildirish who asked for conflict, romance and errr…geekism. Also, for littlered, who told me it was about time I got into this fandom.

**Spoilers**: nada.

**Summary**: In which John is a trifle insecure, Elizabeth finds it fascinating, and then they done sex.

**Quite Easily Demonstrated**

The United States Air Force, generally speaking, is very good at keeping records. They are not quite so good at keeping records a secret, and most people associated with the USAF have, at one time or another, hacked into their files to see what interesting facts about themselves are deemed worthy of security clearance. Most cadets manage this before graduation from the academy, but John Sheppard never really cared enough to try.

It was not until after his arrival on Atlantis that he made the customary pilgrimage through firewall and around password locked screens to see what his employers thought of him. What he found there was not a surprise.

He knew it would be in his file because it was true and at times had even been useful, but he snuck a peek anyway, just to be sure. It's not something he is ashamed of, not by any means, it's just…hard to deal with sometimes. John Sheppard _Man of Action_ is an okay stigma to be stuck with. John Sheppard _Man Who Gets Results But Occasionally Breaks The Rules To Do So_ is okay too because the Pegasus Galaxy tends to let The Rules go hang. But John Sheppard _Closet Math Genius_? Not so much.

He does like to throw it in sometimes to put the others off balance. Rodney, for example has no idea how to respond and always double checks with a calculator before making some sarcastic comment about Beginner's Luck. Ford looks at him like he's sprouted an extra head. Teyla – well Teyla doesn't have much in the way of appreciation for the higher mathematics of Earth. Which is understandable because really, who does?

He doesn't think about it very often but it is always there; hiding in the back of his brain and taunting him. Every now and then, he'd lose control and blurt out a sum or conclusion that no normal person should be able to figure out without a calculator. Or at least an abacus.

Elizabeth knew, although she cheated because she didn't have to hack into his file to read it, that he was genius. She liked to remind him of it every chance she got, though thankfully, she preferred to wait until she had him all to herself before she did so. Since she was far too clever to just ask him to solve things cold turkey, there was a certain level of manipulation involved, which, for her at any rate, was at least as much fun as making him answer.

In the beginning, she would eat cereal with just a little more tongue on the spoon than was absolutely necessary or put her arm on his shoulder and lean in before asking a question about duty rosters. Once she had observed the dilation of his pupils, she would follow up with an obscure mathematical theorem she had read in a book lifted from Zelenka's lab. He would answer without thinking and she would laugh and he would realize he'd been had again.

When they had started sleeping together, it was even harder to avoid Elizabeth's increasingly unfair ploys to access his inner geekdom. Elizabeth-with-a-spoon had been an insurmountable obstacle for his rational thought process. Elizabeth-without-her-clothes left him completely at the mercy of her mathematically fueled machinations.

He worried, sometimes, that if he wasn't a Closet Math Genius, she would stop. Through high school, college, even Basic Training, girls had been more inclined to stop upon discovering his hidden talents, but Elizabeth was hardly a girl. She had more accomplishments than most small European Countries, and she was always surrounded by Very Smart People. Sometimes, that made him nervous.

She was, she had confessed one night when he was decidedly busy doing Other Things, not very good at math. She'd ceased to be coherent shortly thereafter and he'd thought maybe his mind was playing tricks on him, but much later, she had said it again.

"John…I'm not very good at math."

She said many strange things to him after they had sex and her brain returned to being capable of higher function thoughts, but this was one of the oddest. He had no idea how to respond, so he hadn't and when she didn't follow it up at all, he left it alone altogether.

Until she said it again, under similar circumstances, the next night.

"John…I'm not very good at math."

He made a non-committal noise while he frantically tried to think of something to say.

"I am not a very good dancer."

"This isn't a confessional, John." There was laughter in her voice.

"Then why – "

"Because you are, and I find it fascinating."

He had all sorts of things to say that _that_, but she disappeared under the sheet and by the time she got around to asking him what the sixteenth number in the Fibonacci Sequence was, all he could do was tell her the damn answer and fuck her senseless.

"Why is it fascinating?" he asked several days later.

They were both fully clothed and he had planned to keep it that way. At least until he got a straight answer out of her. Then all bets were off.

"The math?" She made a move.

"Yes, the math." He deftly parried.

"I can't do math. That makes it fascinating."

"So if I couldn't do math you would still be….Elizabeth, I am trying to talk to you."

"I can talk and work at the same time."

"Well yes, and to a certain extent so can I, but I was trying to be serious."

"You are cute when you're serious."

So much for fully clothed. But he could still work with this.

"If I wasn't good at math, would you still do this?"

She paused mid-action to think and he took the time to organize his next few thoughts before she destroyed his ability to reason.

"I assume you would still be really hot." It always sounded very strange when Elizabeth said that. "But you wouldn't be the same person anymore, so really, the whole point is moot, isn't it?"

He squinted at her, a bit because she was thinking a little deeper than he was capable of at the moment but mostly because she wasn't playing fair again, and he was trying to not resort to inarticulate sounds as his primary response.

"Elizabeth, I'm a math geek!"

"Closet Math Geek, John." She did several very distracting things all at once. "And I love you."

"Huh."

"John," He could almost hear her rolling her eyes. "I love you. You do math. It's fun to watch. It's also fun to trick you into doing it. There are several other reasons I really don't feel like getting into at the moment. QED, I love you."

"QED, eh?"

"I pay attention when you talk, you know."

"What does it stand for, Elizabeth?"

He loved watching her puzzle over something, and it was nice that this case was not life threatening. It was also nice that the whole "fully clothed" plan had been abandoned.

"Quite….Easily….Demonstrated?"

He laughed and laughed and by the time she'd got him to tell her what it actually stood for, they were both too far gone to translate Latin.

**finis**

gravity.not.included, October 1 2005.


End file.
